Anna Karenina eBook

He went out of the door without a word, and at once
stumbled over Marya Nikolaevna, who had heard of his
arrival and had not dared to go in to see him.
She was just the same as when he saw her in Moscow;
the same woolen gown, and bare arms and neck, and the
same good-naturedly stupid, pockmarked face, only a
little plumper.

“Well, how is he? how is he?”

“Very bad. He can’t get up.
He has kept expecting you. He.... Are
you...with your wife?”

Levin did not for the first moment understand what
it was confused her, but she immediately enlightened
him.

“I’ll go away. I’ll go down
to the kitchen,” she brought out. “Nikolay
Dmitrievitch will be delighted. He heard about
it, and knows your lady, and remembers her abroad.”

Levin realized that she meant his wife, and did not
know what answer to make.

“Come along, come along to him!” he said.

But as soon as he moved, the door of his room opened
and Kitty peeped out. Levin crimsoned both from
shame and anger with his wife, who had put herself
and him in such a difficult position; but Marya Nikolaevna
crimsoned still more. She positively shrank
together and flushed to the point of tears, and clutching
the ends of her apron in both hands, twisted them
in her red fingers without knowing what to say and
what to do.

For the first instant Levin saw an expression of eager
curiosity in the eyes with which Kitty looked at this
awful woman, so incomprehensible to her; but it lasted
only a single instant.

“Well! how is he?” she turned to her husband
and then to her.

“But one can’t go on talking in the passage
like this!” Levin said, looking angrily at a
gentleman who walked jauntily at that instant across
the corridor, as though about his affairs.

“Well then, come in,” said Kitty, turning
to Marya Nikolaevna, who had recovered herself, but
noticing her husband’s face of dismay, “or
go on; go, and then come for me,” she said, and
went back into the room.

Levin went to his brother’s room. He had
not in the least expected what he saw and felt in
his brother’s room. He had expected to
find him in the same state of self-deception which
he had heard was so frequent with the consumptive,
and which had struck him so much during his brother’s
visit in the autumn. He had expected to find
the physical signs of the approach of death more marked—­greater
weakness, greater emaciation, but still almost the
same condition of things. He had expected himself
to feel the same distress at the loss of the brother
he loved and the same horror in face of death as he
had felt then, only in a greater degree. And
he had prepared himself for this; but he found something
utterly different.

In a little dirty room with the painted panels of
its walls filthy with spittle, and conversation audible
through the thin partition from the next room, in
a stifling atmosphere saturated with impurities, on
a bedstead moved away from the wall, there lay covered
with a quilt, a body. One arm of this body was
above the quilt, and the wrist, huge as a rake-handle,
was attached, inconceivably it seemed, to the thin,
long bone of the arm smooth from the beginning to
the middle. The head lay sideways on the pillow.
Levin could see the scanty locks wet with sweat on
the temples and tense, transparent-looking forehead.